My Cuisinart ice cream maker was a wedding gift; it wasn't something on my list, but I jumped up and down with delight when I unwrapped it. I never would've purchased this appliance on my own because it didn't seem practical, yet I loved the idea of making homemade ice cream.
Listen up, children, pregnant women, and lightweights: this particular KitKat variety is not for you. Well, with 0.8% alcoholic content per 2 KitKat bars, it's highly unlikely anyone will actually get drunk on these things. Still...
I'll be the first to admit that I have a problem: I'm utterly addicted to tea.
You might be familiar with the use of zucchini blossoms in cooking and maybe even know how to make herbal simple syrups. But if you really want to show off as someone who knows how to use flowering plants in food, try adding some flower water to your cooking/baking repertoire.
It's nearly impossible to keep a stovetop clean when cooking, at least, in my experience. No matter what I do, liquid and solid food bits fall to the surface and around the burners every single time, creating a hard-to-clean mess.
If you're lucky enough to have a dishwasher, you probably use that sucker to clean everything (minus your good cooking knives), and maybe even to cook your food, too. However, dishwashers are not without their faults. Dishes can still come out spotty and even with chunks of food on them, which usually leads to some hand-washing afterward.
Coffee beans are one of my favorite things in the entire world. They smell intoxicatingly perfect. And when ground up and steeped in hot (or cold) water, they somehow taste even better than they smell.
Welcome back, my hacking friends. We use our smartphones every day, for business, socialization, and leisure. The number of iPhone users is increasing in dozens of millions every year, with a whopping 63.2 million users in 2014 alone. That's a lot of users.
For the longest time, I only ever did one thing with mangoes. I would cut off a chunk of the fruit, squeeze some lime over it, and eat it straight out of my hands as though it were a watermelon slice. I didn't do this because I loved devouring mango in the messiest way possible; I did it because I had no clue how to peel a mango. As such, I never cooked with mango: I ate it directly off the peel, or didn't eat it at all.
Fish is a remarkably useful ingredient, whether you eat it as is or use fish sauce to give your recipes extra depth and flavor. However, if you enjoy a glass of Guinness on occasion, you might be surprised to know that there's most likely fish in that beverage, too.
White rice is cheap, filling, and tasty. No wonder so many countries in the world rely on it as a mealtime staple, including most of East and Southeast Asia. Alas, because of its relative lack of nutrition and its high calorie count, consuming lots of white rice regularly also puts people at risk for diseases like diabetes and obesity.
Chicken wings, pizza, beer, and chips are among the top five most popular Super Bowl foods, and we eat them in staggering quantities. According to the stats, Domino's and Pizza Hut sell over 25 million slices of pizza during the Super Bowl, and Americans snack on over 1 billion chicken wings, over 11 million pounds of potato chips, and drink over 49 million cases of beer.
When I watched the first Cincinnati Bengals edition of the HBO series Hard Knocks back in 2009, among wide receiver Chad Johnson's bravado and attention-grabbing antics was a segment on backup quarterback Jordan Palmer and his newly-developed app, which was still in its infancy. Six years later, I've revisited his creation and have to admit—it's pretty damn useful.
A good, sharp knife is a cook's best friend, which is why there's so much passionate debate about what kind you should get. Most enthusiastic home cooks opt for a stainless steel knife, but it turns out there's a different option that the pros favor, and that's carbon steel.
If you struggle with deciding which wine you should buy for an intimate dinner, or the type of beer with the highest alcohol content that doesn't taste like tree bark, then check out some of these great alcohol-friendly apps to make better booze decisions.
The interwebs is a great source of information, but sometimes said information is not always legit. That can be frustrating when it comes to making fun food, costumes, and arts and crafts for Halloween, like this bowl of "bloody" gummy worms.
With developments from tech giants Apple and Samsung being shared throughout the interwebs, the term smartwatch has become increasingly popular over the last year. That being said, smartwatches have been around for a while.
Fresh herbs can be delicate, and it's not always easy to figure out how to cut, crush, or muddle them to make the most of their flavors. Get too rough, and you have a bunch of bruised and muddy-tasting herbs, which is due to too much chlorophyll being released. Don't do enough prep, and the herbs don't release the essential oils and volatile molecules that are the foundation of their flavor.
Okay, it's true: even the highest quality instant coffee is never going to replace really good fresh beans (and properly cleaning your coffee maker) when it comes to creating a great cup of joe. However, instant coffee does have all kinds of uses in the kitchen, as the smart folks over at Reddit observed.
We tend to assume that eating is mostly a physical act, but the mind has so much to do with the choices we make.
Beer, glorious beer! It can stop grilled meats from producing carcinogens, can make fried foods super crunchy, and it even saved civilization from total annihilation. Is there anything it can't do? Sadly, yes.
Biting into a perfectly ripe mango is living proof of nature's goodness. The flesh is at once creamy, smooth, tart, and sweet. Plus they're incredibly good for you.
Watermelon is the perfect snack for hot temperatures. It's hydrating, crisp, and refreshing, especially when it's chilled. Yet some people aren't content with leaving a good thing alone, which has given us many watermelon-based innovations, some great (vodka-filled watermelons) and some delightfully strange (square watermelons).
It's a small but very real frustration: you want a chilled drink, but you open the freezer only to see nothing but empty ice trays. Fortunately, there's a simple way to make ice cubes quickly—use hot water. Yup, you read that correctly. Hot water freezes more rapidly than cold.
Most of you probably spread ketchup all over hamburgers and fries. Some of you may even drink it straight. But did you know that tame (and slightly addictive) condiment in your fridge is also a powerful cleaning agent?
We've all walked into a restaurant with the best of intentions only to order something absurd, like a cheese-injected burger topped with bacon on a brioche bun. It's delicious for the few minutes it takes to eat the thing, and then you're left with a bellyful of regret and an inability to directly look at the numbers on your scale. Turns out that getting yourself to make healthy choices isn't as hard as one might think.
Bottled water is a rip-off. Not only is it pretty much the same stuff that comes out of your tap for free, but plastic bottles are rarely recycled and thus account for a huge amount of the waste that's overflowing our landfills. Next Up: Water Bottles You Can Eat
I'll be the first to admit how horrible my memory is, whether it's remembering to take out the garbage or paying a bill on time. That's why I regularly utilize the stock Reminders app on my iPhone; it's definitely compensated for my memory deficiencies.
I've already shown you an easy last-minute prank involving toothpaste-filled Oreos, now here's a great joke involving an integral part of the cookie-eating experience—milk.
Imagine that Tinder fornicated with Facebook and had a baby. The product of that union would be the hideous, yet overwhelmingly interesting SocialRadar, an app dedicated to stalkers and stalkees.
The lockout feature in iOS 7, which securely locks your device after a few incorrect passcode entries, can be a real pain in the ass sometimes.
You don't have to be Drake to realize that some friends are better than others. There are friends you know are only there for the party, and friends who actually listen when you whine about your life. There are friends you go out with for a beer, and friends you call when you're drunk and need a lift at 4am.
When we're dead tired but need to stay awake, we humans can do many things to make the drowsiness go away, from taking a cold shower to downing energy drinks or coffee to acupressure.
No matter what the clean freaks out there try to tell me, I still drink my Los Angeles tap water without a care in the world. I figure that I've already consumed much more heinous things in my lifetime. Street vendor "steak" burritos comes to mind.
Did YOU know...that African Americans have the highest rate of colorectal cancer, and that it is more likely to be advanced at diagnosis? The age for colonoscopy in ACG guidelines dropped to 45 for African Americans in 2009. This digestive ditty about colon cancer screening in Black Americans pays homage to Beyonce's iconic Single Ladies video. Help us to get the word out--Email this link to your African American colleagues and friends and post it to your Facebook or Twitter pals! We can prev...
There's nothing better than gulping down an ice cold beer to calm the senses and ease the mind. The holiday season can be very stressful as people scramble around trying to find the best gifts for friends and family. And we all know that gifts can be very hit or miss, but it's pretty hard to go wrong giving someone a nice bottle of whiskey or a nice selection of beers.
The holiday season is here, and most people have already started counting down. Advent calendars are a very traditional way to keep track of how many days are left, but most of the ones you see are either boring, made for little kids, or just plain ugly.
The concept and structure of Christmas hasn't changed much since its inception. In its infancy, Christians recruited Roman pagans by associating Christmas with the Saturnalia, an ancient Roman festival in honor of the deity Saturn (also held in December). The pagans had long worshiped trees (as did other historical cultures) and would bring them into their homes and decorate them, something that influenced our modern holiday decorations. While certain things such as gifts and ornaments have b...
Here's a survival technique for making a fire with the most basic of resources—assuming you can find two sticks to rub together!
Want to make boring old colorless water brighten up on command? Well, you can control the color of water with this little magic trick. Actually, it's not really magic, but a classic science experiment known commonly as the iodine clock reaction, which uses the reactions between water and chemicals to instantly colorize water, seemingly by command. You can use different colorless chemicals to produce different colors, and you can even make the color vanish to make the water clear again.
